135 Responses

I don't know what the evidence is for the helmet hair thing but pretty much every woman I can think of cites it. ... It's a shame, because I enjoy riding. But not more than I enjoy looking professional in a professional environment.

I can't say I have personally met many who see it as a big issue, but I can see for some it might be and it is a crime if this stops someone from bicycling. It is a fact that it is better to bicycle unhelmeted than to not bicycle at all, so if the law stops anybody the country has lost.

It is certainly noticeable in Europe that many ladies ride in their finery - I've personally seen "middle aged" ladies in dress clothes looking like they're headed to the opera. It works for men as well, I can remember the great picture I witnessed outside Utrecht (Netherlands) when a group of suit wearing, briefcase carrying, gentlemen emerged out of the morning fog riding bicycles to work in the city. The "cycle chic" movement has reached NZ and I've noticed helmets are less common among its participants.

Many years ago an elderly lady contacted me for help with a helmet exemption. She looked after her less able husband, lived in a semi-rural area, only had a bicycle for transport, and suffered headaches from the helmet. Her doctor had filled in an exemption application with her, this had been returned due to some error on the form. She returned to her doctor only to find he had left and been replaced, the new doctor refused to fill the form in correctly arguing it was better she did not ride and to ride without a helmet - the helmet law campaign had done its worse. The lady was at her wits end, concerned she wouldn't be able to care for her husband much longer if she had no transport to get to the shops etc.

I tried to engage the doctor, tried the local MP, the Minister - all to no avail. All I could do was advise she ignore the law, something she was not keen on doing.

I don't know what happened in the long run, but if she stopped bicycling not only did it likely impact her ability to care for her husband, she probably also died sooner.

All for a law which has failed to reduce injury rates and instead produced a cost to society. A tragedy.

What a frustrating story - that poor lady! What a ridiculous situation.

I remember when the helmet law came in. I was at intermediate, I think, and the immediate effect was that I refused to bike to school anymore because I'd look like a dork.* These things matter terribly when you're 11.

*Not helped, I must add, by my mother's purchase of the biggest, ugliest, dorkiest helmet available in Nelson. Even now, when I'm used to seeing helmets, it remains spectacularly ugly. It had these funny segments along its length that reminded me of nothing so much as a grass grub.

I don't think cyclists are in danger of feeling complacent on a road shared with cars, SUVs, buses and trucks! Helmet or no helmet, you're always the ant running with the elephants. The danger is that motorists see your helmet and think you're safe.

Not wearing a cycle helmet has positive outcomes for the public health system, because this results in more fatalities (no cost to the health system, but a negative outcome for costs to society in the form of increased welfare payments)

Wearing a cycle helmet has negative outcomes for the public health system, because fixing something fixable costs money. But if the level of fixability is low, it also results in a negative outcome in costs to society in the form of increased welfare payments as well.

I begin to realize that I am completely and utterly crap at explaining any of this. Sorry folks!

Not wearing a cycle helmet has positive outcomes for the public health system, because this results in more fatalities (no cost to the health system, but a negative outcome for costs to society in the form of increased welfare payments)

I see we're slowly inching towards my plan of having most roads abruptly end in cliffs. It would solve most of society's problems. In the long term, it would solve society itself.

Not wearing a cycle helmet has positive outcomes for the public health system... I begin to realize that I am completely and utterly crap at explaining any of this. Sorry folks!

Okay, I suppose I was asking for a whole bunch of sarcasm like that. Although, of course, I'd point out that your premise is completely wrong since it fails to take into account the potential economic productivity of the cyclists (but, yes, I know it's a joke).

I have 17 other things I should be doing, but the re-emergence of this thread reminded me that I hadn't responded to Amy's question below (tried to do it on the radio but we ran out of time).

Amy Gale wrote:

On the subject of correlation vs causation, it occurs to me that the drop in cycling-as-transport could also be related to the introduction of Japanese used car imports, which happened at about the same time as the bike helmet legislation and the education campaigns that preceded it.

The studies in NZ haven't looked at either Smeed's law or the health effects of people who've stopped cycling. The NZ work purely compares the cost of the cycle helmets with the cost of the injuries that might otherwise have occured (without helmets). Needless to say that there is a lot of debate about what could have been prevented, and how to figure in the existing trends for a decrease in injury rates. But I haven't found any papers claiming that the NZ law has had a cost benefit for adults, even under this simplistic comparison.

Overseas studies have looked at Smeed's law and the rest. See the article I linked to previously.

And here's a link to a Guardian article about (some) British schools banning cycling: